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Reviews
Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991)
too much soap but Close is excellent
Glenn Close was very good in this well-done soap. But,let's face it, children are not really such huggable little angels as these two are all the time. It was a foregone conclusion, of course, that the Walken and Close characters would be subjected to the basic melodramatic plot: they would encounter at least one problem, resolve it, and live happily ever after. Was it really necessary to have all the people (as well as one cat and one dog) be so unrealistically good-hearted and lovable? The movie would have been much better if there had been an attempt to go deeper than warm-hearted bromides and clichés. The depiction of life as it really was at the time would have been much more interesting.
Welcome to Hard Times (1967)
a bad western
I kept waiting for this bad movie to move beyond its stock characters and hackneyed plot, but it never made it. We have floozies with hearts of gold, grizzled old-timers, cowardly townspeople, and an over-the-top Aldo Ray playing evil incarnate. Elisha Cook is given the opportunity to reprise his Shane role, the spunky, fearless, impulsive, and doomed fool: Jack Palance, with one of cinema's great sneers, shot him dead in Shane and Aldo Ray does him the same courtesy in Welcome to Hard Times. One plot gimmick after another is thrown in, evidently just to fill up some screen time, when more time might have been spent developing the characters of the townspeople.